Again, my son Will picked the movie for a Friday-night movie night. His choice was The Greatest Showman, which overtook our household last September and forced us into a late costume change from Moana characters into characters from The Greatest Showman for our church’s Halloween family costume contest (side-note: we won).
If you haven’t seen this movie of finding hope, beauty, and redemption in the wonder and diversity of humanity, I hope you’ll give it a chance. It’s a movie that is a loose biography of Phineas T. Barnum and his journey of putting together the Ringling Brothers and P.T. Barnum & Bailey circus. Sure, the movie might gloss over his penchant for profiteering or bending the truth slightly to sell a show. But the movie does recast P. T. Barnum as a “woke” Barnum. One who finds beauty in all of the diversity of humanity, then dresses it up (maybe with some exaggeration), and organically sells it as a extraordinary show. He brings people together previously outcast as “freaks” or “oddities,” from the fringes of society. Instead of shunning them, he brings them front and center, and celebrates them.